Bronx River Is Alive! With Hundreds Of New Fish

It is the Running of the Fish. The New York City Parks and Recreation Department restocked the Bronx River with 400 alewife herring Tuesday, the second year in a row that the agency has restocked the river with the native migratory fish.

For the past 15 years, the department has been repopulating the Bronx River with local fish. This year, the herring were transported from Connecticut to New York in a special tanker truck. Marit Larson, the head of the NYC Parks Natural Resources Group, likens it to a giant swimming pool on the back of a truck.

"They attach like a large hose to it, and the fish come flying out within a minute," she said.

Larson says the fish have helped turn the river into a recovering ecosystem, where fish like the alewife can breed and thrive.

"It's just thrilling to see what was historically viewed as an open sewer and a highly degraded system being now part of the regional recovery of a threatened fish population," Larson said.

NYC Parks coordinated with Bronx River Alliance, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection to restock the river.